Barry Made Sexual Advances, 3 Virgin Islands Women Testify

Three Virgin Islands women testified Monday that Washington Mayor Marion Barry made crude sexual advances toward them in a St. Thomas hotel room in which an X-rated video played on a television screen and what smelled like smoke from crack cocaine billowed from an adjacent bathroom.

Linda Creque Maynard, a mother of two, twice broke down in tears as she described how Barry forced her to have sex with him after she unsuccessfully tried to resist him.

Dixie Lee Hedrington, who said that she fended Barry off, testified: “He was a pig and there was no way I would let him touch me.”

Barry, who was arrested in a Washington hotel room in an FBI sting operation in January after allegedly smoking crack cocaine, is on trial in federal district court on 14 charges of perjury and use of illegal drugs.

The testimony, relating to a Barry visit in March of 1988, amounted to the most sweeping attack on Barry’s character thus far admitted into evidence.

The three witnesses put Barry near what they took to be crack cocaine and marijuana. But none of them testified to having seen Barry use crack, although one said that she saw him use marijuana.

Maynard said she was invited to Barry’s hotel room by Charles Lewis, a longtime family friend and a close confidant of Barry. In Barry’s room, she said, the mayor pulled her down on the hotel room bed and “was all over me.”

“He was drinking his drink, and leaning on me and touching me,” she said.

She said that she was left alone with Barry, who was clad “in a robe,” for at least 10 minutes. “I was fighting the mayor off. He already had me down on the bed.”

“Did you and Mr. Barry have sexual relations at the hotel?” prosecutor Judith E. Retchin asked.

“Yes,” Maynard said almost inaudibly, sobbing.

“Did you want that to happen?” Retchin asked.

Again almost inaudibly, Maynard sobbed: “No.”

After she left Barry’s room, she said, she found $50 in her purse.

Hedrington, who is pregnant, did not testify in person. She said that Lewis escorted her to Barry’s room.

Hedrington, who said she was wearing a slit dress, testified that Barry said “he liked women with long legs and (that he) wanted to be between my legs. . . . I was totally irritated with his approach. . . . He went on and on, sexually, what we could do. I told him, I don’t appreciate your charm.”

A third witness, Zenna Matthias, said that she accepted Lewis’ offer to meet the mayor because it would provide valuable contacts in Washington, where she hoped to go to law school. She described finding Barry sitting on the bed watching an X-rated movie.

She said she insisted on sitting on a chair out of view of the television screen. “I told him I have children, I’ve seen the human anatomy,” she testified.

Hedrington testified that when Lewis greeted Barry at his hotel room, he said, “I’ve got something for you.” Lewis then showed the mayor a small pipe and “explained to him what it’s for,” she testified. Then they went into the bathroom, she said, and she identified the smell that wafted out from the bathroom to be that of crack cocaine.

“I just drew my own conclusion” that the two were smoking crack, she said.